Holy, Holy, Holy

"We are made a holy people unto the Lord."

IF I STRETCH MY HAND TOWARD HEAVEN, I cannot reach it. In the physical, God is far from me. I cannot control the sunrise and cause it to rise slowly nor steer the amount of light in any particular direction. No effort I make causes the natural world to bend and bow to me, past planting a few seeds and watching them grow. Men have studied the weather but cannot control it, cannot steer the ocean currents where they will but must simply sail their ships according to how the waters move.

GOD IS LIGHT and in Him is no darkness at all. No shadows of turning. No variableness. He isn’t brighter to one and dimmer to the next. The only change we see in Him is through our foggy mental lenses. What we have placed of Him in our heart alters how we see Him.

GOD IS HOLY. Without holiness, the Word says, we will not see the Lord (Hebrews 12:14). Why is this? We have quoted these words or passed by them without thinking. We have made holiness into an impossibility, yet that is not God’s intent. Holiness is something He’s made it possible that we attain. As the Scriptures say, In Him we live and move and have our being. Because He is holy, through Jesus Christ, we are made holy.

Why? Other than seeing Him. Well, our view of Him matters. Our viewpoint matters. Two men can stare at the same scene and see different things. One looks at God and sees Him as harsh and cruel because he has no revelation of Jesus’ death and Resurrection. The other sees Jesus as his gentle Savior, as loving and kind. We can look at the Father and remember John 3:16, For God SO LOVED the world that HE GAVE HIS ONLY-BEGOTTEN SON. Or we can look at Him and get lost in a sea of religious rules crafted by men and not of God’s intent.

“Human beings do not provide for him—as if there was anything he needed. No! He is the source of all and gives of himself for our good. From him come life, health, and everything else.” (Acts 17:25 Remedy)

Holiness is ours so that we can come boldly to the throne. God, the Father, sent God, the Son, so that God, the Holy Spirit could inhabit us on earth and enable us to receive all that He is from our physical needs – health and healing, financial abundance, mental peace and wellness – to our spiritual need for a Savior and the life that only God can give. But God’s life, as holiness, was not anything we could ever purchase. Only Jesus could do that and for this reason, He died and rose again. His death is not complete without His Resurrection, and our lives as children of the Most High are not truly full unless we can speak with our Father as who we are.

God has made of men many different personalities and talents and callings. In the church, we are made up of many parts which work together to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth. Not denominations. God did not divide us into Protestant and Catholic, nor Baptist, Presbyterian, and Pentecostal. Men did that. In the book of Acts, they preached only one gospel – Jesus Christ crucified and Resurrected, who saves the spirit of man and heals the body and renews the mind. Jesus Christ as King of Kings over all nations and peoples of the earth. The apostles traveled to the then-known world with this message. We have greater capability with modern technology, but that technology is not meant to fund distractions. And our prayer and worship of God is not meant to divide us but to unite us. IN HOLINESS. We are made a holy people unto the Lord.

GOD IS LIGHT, and in His light, all is exposed in us. Both our good deeds and our sins. A man who has been cleansed by the blood can stand in the light and receive blessing and great forgiveness. A man who approaches God on his own without the blood covering him will die. Sin and death cannot live in the holiness of God. HE IS HOLY, that is part of His nature. He has not made Himself holy, as if it is a shield or a device to harm men. HE IS LOVE in this same manner, and He loved men so much, He desired them so much, that He provided Jesus’ blood to cleanse and make us holy so that He could spend time with us, intimate, close, Father time. So we could talk and laugh and learn and speak. And sound like Him and act like Him and be who He is in a world lost in pervading darkness.

Because we are made holy, we can spread His light wherever we go. We can talk like Him and live dedicated, separated from the world, not bound by the desires and lusts of our flesh, but overflowing with God’s strength and authority to have His goodness. HOLINESS SEPARATES US. God spoke these words to Israel when He required of them the Law. Jeus is in all points the requirements of the Law, from the sacrifices and feast days of it, to the tithe which it requires. (Why did God give a tithe to God? Romans 11:16, so that from the portion given which is made holy, the lump it came from could also be holy. We are that lump.)

The Law required holiness. Jesus fulfilled it and made God’s holiness accessible because God is gracious and merciful and kind. That is the only reason we are now made holy. It is not of any effort we have made, nor because we follow any particular rules, but simply because God reconciled the man He had made to Himself, through the giving of Himself, because the Man who was Himself chose, before the world was created, to be born of a people raised up over generations to demonstrate God’s holiness, so that the entire earth, Jew and Gentile, barbarian and Scythian, male and female, bond and free, could become a beautiful, loving, HOLY FAMILY, who look and sound like God.

“For in him we have life and motion and existence; as certain of your verse writers have said, For we are his offspring.” (Acts 17:28 BBE)


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Suzanne D. Williams, Author
www.suzannedwilliams.com
www.feelgoodromance.com